Aldo Encarnacion joined the DiODe team to work on the mathematical modelling of cellular decision making. The main part of his PhD project will involve the development of a theory that understands metabolic pathways in terms of decision making strategies.

A bifurcation analysis of the model shows that for previous parameterisations there is always decision deadlock in the case of three or more same-quality options.
This result motivates the change of parameterisation with respect to previous work.

In the video below, a swarm of 150 kilobot robots takes a value-sensitive decentralised decision between two options (red and blue). The swarm must select the best quality option if the quality is higher than a given threshold (in this study, greater than 1.5). In this experiment, the options have quality v=5 thus the swarm makes a decision for one option (in this case, the blue option).
The overlaying coloured circles show the two options localised in the environment. The options are signalled through two static kilobot robots acting as beacons that send infrared messages with the option’s ID and quality. The robots light up their LED in a colour that corresponds to their internal commitment state: green for the uncommitted state and red and blue for commitment to the option of the respective colour.

The progress of the DiODe project can now be followed up on Youtube. Below you see a video which shows the initial state of setting up a tracking system for the Kilobots, the micro-robots we use to investigate consensus decision-making experimentally.

In the future we will post new videos that show the Kilobots in action. At the same time we want to use the DiODe Youtube channel to document the project’s chronology.